Thursday, April 26, 2018

Lady is working on a book so she hires "S" from Craiglist to take care of her young son as a live-in nanny. S is a woman trying to explore herself and relationship with her mother through art - that art takes her to an ugly place with Seth - Lady's eldest son who is an elective mute.The story is told from alternating first person POVs of Lady and S. Both have terrible relationships with their mothers and secrets and lies which are tearing Lady's life apart.Very introspective, often in a darkly funny way - not to mention quite a bit of irony.I didn't LIKE either woman but the tale was fascinating and thought provoking and really raw.Terri

Friday, April 20, 2018

I always love cozies set in libraries and this is no exception. Tend to like a bit of woo-woo too - so ghosts are fine and this one is rather grandmotherly.Carrie has been staying in Clover Ridge with her Aunt and Uncle. Rather than moving on as she has most of her life, she decides to stay and she gets a job as the programming and events director at the town library. For her first event though, the guest speaker is murdered during his presentation. He was a former detective and he was talking about an unsolved murder. Carrie feels a sense of responsibility and tries to solve the murder with the victim's son Jared.I really enjoyed the story and characters. I had a couple suspension of disbelief moments - like a detective would have all his info on an iPad and not save to iCloud or use locate my iPad (I've seen that one work when an attorney here left his in a taxi - it makes a lot of noise and you can see ona map. Also, though I enjoyed the ghost, I am not sure how much she was a way to advance the plot without being able to get info another way.That said, it was a very fun read and an Agatha Award Nominee.Terri

Thursday, April 19, 2018

A man falls from the sky when a parachute does not open. He is dressed at a British soldier but this is WWII and it is more likely he is a spy. Ben is charged to find out and who the man may have been meeting and who of his neighbors and friends may be supporting the Germans. As usual, Rhys Bowen delivers a believable historical story with wonderful twists and turns.Fascinating characters and lots of spying going on. From Bletchley to London and back, secrets abound. Absolutely loved it!Terri

Monday, April 9, 2018

It’s
March already! How come the older I get, the faster time flies? No need to
answer that question. Anyone who’s old knows the feeling, and if you aren’t yet
old, you will know it—with luck and survival skills.

Winners
of February’s contest, which is whatever book you want as long as I have a
copy, are: Alicia Carol, Linda Rorex, Rita Wray and ALICE DUNCAN! Yes! There’s
another one! And she lives in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. She also claims to wear
a kilt, but I haven’t seen proof of same yet. I’ll send you an e-book of your
choice, Alice, since I can’t afford to send a real book. Alicia, Linda and
Rita, please let me know which book you’d like, and I’ll send it to you. It may
take me a while to do so (unless you want an e-book) I regret to say, because
I’ve been a bit dilatory of late.

So.
Here’s the fabulous cover of next
month’s release, SPIRITS UNEARTHED, Daisy Gumm Majesty’s 12th
(actually, it’s her 13th, but let’s not go into that again) adventure. Right below the cover is a link to purchase
it for your Amazon Kindle or your B&N Nook:

February
was kind of a dopey month. I got edits for SPIRITS UNEARTHED while I was sick,
and I fear for the book’s reception and overall worth. I think it stinks,
although I do hope I’m wrong. The cover is spectacular. Yes, Spike is a
black-and-tan dachshund; red dachshunds show up better on book covers.
Therefore, he’s red on the cover (by the way, red is dachshund-speak for brown).
But his attitude on the cover is pure Spike, and he’s doing precisely what he
does in the book to get the action started. Hope the rest of the book lives up
to its cover. If you ever want to understand insecurity, go in for a writing
career. Insecurity guaranteed, curse it.

Oh,
and everyone else I know was sick in February, too. Basically, February was a
sickly, sucky month. Fortunately, the hounds seem to be all right, even
Giblett, my problem child, which doesn’t seem quite fair to me but what do I
know?

Also,
I got an invitation to attend my – this just makes me gasp with appalled-ness –
55th high-school reunion. I swear, I don’t know how I got so old so
fast. I wouldn’t mind the aging thing if it didn’t hurt so much, but oh, well.
However, I’m going to attend. This is mainly because I’ll get to see Phyllis
McKown and Janet Levine Goldberg, with whom I used to play flute in the Eliot
Junior High School band in Altadena, California. I don’t think the three of us
have been together since Eliot days! Egad. I only recently found out that
neither Phyllis nor Janet considered herself a musician, but both merely sort
of faked it. And here I thought we were all ardent flautists who practiced all
the time (even though by doing so we made our dogs howl). Show’s how much
anyone knows about anyone else when s/he’s a kid, huh? Also, it cleared up any
doubt I might have had about why I was selected to be first-chair flute.
Evidently, I was the only one who could play the instrument!

Anyway,
now I’m in the process of writing Daisy’s 13th (or 14th)
adventure, SHAKEN SPIRITS, in which Daisy has already been hit by a car and had
her left shoulder dislocated. She’s recovering nicely, although she’s in a good
deal of pain. The car that hit her was a 1923 Cole Sportster Sedan, quite a
classy car. In fact, here it is! It’s not the real culprit. It’s the agent the
real culprit used to whack poor Daisy. After
he stole it from a grand estate in the San Rafael hills. Then he abandoned it
on the Angeles Crest, the bounder:

Daisy’s
going to miss choir practice for a couple of weeks, and she won’t be able to
use the Ouija board or shuffle tarot cards for a while, but she’ll recover. I’m
also relatively certain she and Sam will figure out who did the evil deed, why,
and make certain whoever dunnit will never be able to do it again. If that made
any sense.

Well, whatever.
Let’s see now. What should I give away at the end of March? SPIRITS UNEARTHED
comes out in April, so what I think I’ll do is give away one copy each of
SPIRITS ONSTAGE (in which Daisy has a marvelous
time playing Katisha, the mean old nastypants in Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado), UNSETTLED SPIRITS (in which
people keep dropping dead during communion service at Daisy’s church), BRUISED
SPIRITS (in which Daisy and her friends save the life of a battered woman –
this is based on a true story, by the way. The woman lives in Australia), and
SPIRITS UNITED, in which a dastardly plot at the California Institute of
Technology (or Caltech as it’s affectionately known) is foiled by Daisy and her
gang. I think Sam’s Voodoo juju goes a bit wacky in this one, too.

A
word about my monthly contests. I love giving my work to people; however, I
found out quite by accident a few months ago that sending books to Great
Britain, Australia, and other countries outside the United States is beyond my
monetary capability. If a resident of a nation other than the United States has
an e-reader, I’ll happily supply that person with an e-book. If a person
doesn’t have an e-reader and still likes to read book-books, he or she is on
his or her own. I’m sorry, but what I laughingly call my writing career hasn’t
made me wealthy yet. And it probably won’t, but let’s not get in to that
because it always depresses me. So. That’s that.

If
you’d like to enter the contest, just send me an email (alice@aliceduncan.net) and give me your
name and home address. If you’d like to be added to my mailing list, you may do
so on my web site (http://aliceduncan.net/) or email me (you
won’t be smothered in e-mails, because I only write one blog a month, and
that’s an effort). If you’d like to be friends on Facebook, visit my page at https://www.facebook.com/alice.duncan.925.

Enjoy some Mayhem & Magic!

Our blog is meant to evoke fun with the magic of myths, folklore, movies and the mayhem of murder and madness. We have to keep it interesting so if you like different genres of movies and books then you're at the right blog. Our authors are a wide range of experts and our readers know what is top of the line in their favorite genres. Sometimes we post recipes that might be fun to try if a culinary author has one in her book that we think is especially yummy or one that Terri and I have created and want to share with you. Enjoy Guest Blogger Alice Duncan's monthly muse on her books and writing mysteries.

Plus you won't want to miss our book reviews, author interviews or our guest bloggers. So grab your favorite beverage then join us for some magic and mayhem! The good news is that you don't have to leave the house or your comfy chair. We have something for everyone's taste and every month we have a different topic for our bloggers: ones we feel that might be useful in your own writing and reader points of view. Not to mention, life in general. So join us and be sure to have a notebook handy as your to-be-read pile will grow as you add books, recipes, movies and t.v. series you won't want to miss. Not to mention folktales, myths or ideas you may wish to explore. Be careful what you wish for because on mayhemandmagic2 you just might find it.